The purpose of the present investigation is to explore the relationship between community organization and psychiatric disorder. There are a number of villages in Israel which were settled about twenty years ago by immigrants from North Africa and Asian countries. The villages were initially administered by the Jewish Agency and designed as cooperative farming communities, whose ideology is highly egalitarian. In spite of this initial similarity the villages developed widely different forms of political, economic and social organizations. Some have effective political institutions, others are ruled dictatorially by a small number of individuals in a mafia-like fashion and others have become completely disorganized. The extent of economic inequality also varies dramatically from one village to another. It is a particular methodological advantage of this setting that it is possible to select pairs of villages which are comparable as to ethnic composition, geographic origin, cultural values, social class, family structure, recent history and agricultural and financial resources, yet which have evolved strikingly different community organizations. A comparison of rates of deviance in such sets of communities can be utilized to examine the relationship between community organization and psychiatric disorder. Material on psychiatric disorder has been gathered in three comparable Kurdistani and two comparable Yemenite villages. The results so far indicate that the political organization of a village has a critical effect on rates of psychiatric disorder and other forms of deviant behavior.